A ‘newish’ online world designed for teens called Gaia Online has remained under the radar for a while now, but recently, the San Jose company has been showing some pretty compelling stats – like 2 million unique hits a month! But what’s more interesting than the total number of teens checking out the site is how users are being encouraged to contribute back into the system and the monetary system being used.
In an interview with GigaOM, Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online explains that “the world is just a conduit to the larger activity on Gaia.
In addition, there are website arenas where users can upload
and rate each other’s artwork and other content (7-10% total activity),
or play multiplayer Flash mini-games with group chat (10-15% total
activity.) The largest cohort of activity (wholly 30%) takes place in
the Gaia forums, and here’s where the truly staggering numbers come in:
Averaging a million posts a day and a billion posts so far, Gaia’s
message boards (with topics running the gamut from pop culture to
politics) is second only to Yahoo in popularity.
To get the amount of participation from it’s users that it does, Gaia has introduced an ingenius monetary system.
A unique innovation is the way the company distributes its virtual gold currency: instead of selling it for real money (as with There) or allowing its trade on the open market (as with Second Life), Gaians are automatically given gold for participation: You get gold for posting on the Forums, for riding events, for uploading content, for exploring the world. Subscribers are rewarded for engaging in Gaia, in other words — the reward incents them to engage in Gaia even more.
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